Malls gathered five million facial images
Cadillac Fairview embedded cameras in kiosks and took photos without shoppers’ consent
Cadillac Fairview broke Canadian privacy laws after the company installed facial recognition technology inside a dozen malls and analyzed visitors’ images without obtaining proper consent, federal and provincial privacy commissioners announced Thursday.
Toronto’s Eaton Centre, Sherway Gardens and Fairview Mall all used the software. Markville Mall in Markham, Lime Ridge in Hamilton, and seven others in four other provinces did as well.
Cameras embedded in wayfinding directories — the digital touch-screen maps that help visitors navigate malls — captured images of faces within the camera’s field of view, and converted them into a “biometric numerical representation” of each individual. That information was used to assess individuals’ ages and genders, and to monitor foot traffic.
While the privacy commissioners found the company had contravened legislation designed to protect Canadians’ personal information, experts and politicians noted that these regulators wield little in the way of enforcement powers.
“They should be facing fines,” said New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, a member of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
“I’m really hoping that parliament will get serious about the threat posed by facial recognition technology and lay down some rules before it is too late and the abuse of this technology becomes ubiquitous.”
The investigators did not find evidence that the technology, known as Anonymous Video Analytics, was used to identify individuals, according to a joint report released Thursday by the federal, British Columbia and Alberta commissioners’ offices.
In a statement, Cadillac Fairview described the technology as a “beta test” that was “briefly conducted” at some locations, and noted the report “found no evidence that the company was using the technology for the purposes of identifying individuals.”
The company disabled and removed the software more than two years ago, “when concerns were first raised by the public,” the statement said, adding “we take the concerns of our visitors seriously and wanted to ensure they were acknowledged and addressed.”
Questions about the use of facial recognition technology in Cadillac Fairview’s malls first surfaced in 2018 after a user on Reddit, a popular online forum, posted a picture of a malfunctioning wayfinding screen at Calgary’s Chinook Centre. The screen displayed lines of code that appeared to reference facial recognition programs.
The investigators found the privacy complaints “wellfounded,” and considered the case “resolved” after the company stopped using the technology, deleted the stored numerical facial representations.